Coping with extreme speech conditions in simultaneous interpreting

This study addresses the strategies used by simultaneous interpreters when confronted with syntactically complex sentences and with a high speed of delivery. The material consists of recordings of fifteen professional interpreters rendering two passages (one with a complex sentence structure, the other with a high speed of delivery) from French into Dutch. Most, but not all, interpreters managed to produce an acceptable translation. In the case of the complex passage, most interpreters opted for a segmentation strategy, while a few applied a tailing strategy. In the case of the high delivery speed, most opted for a tailing strategy, but a few applied segmentation.